Zomato’s case study, success story, marketing strategies and the overall journey will serve as an inspiring business model for Indian entrepreneurs for many years to come. Just like a typical startup, Zomato too has had its fair share of ups and downs. Because of this reason, many aspiring entrepreneurs can learn a lot by delving deep into what Zomato has done to reach at the pinnacle of success in the food delivery industry.

In this post, we will take a good look at the entire journey of Zomato, its marketing strategies and the way it shaped the online food-ordering-and-delivery system in India.

Quick trivia

Did you know that Zomato has some sort of presence in as many as 24 countries and 10,000 cities? Zomato doesn’t provide food delivery in all these countries, but lists a plethora of information in terms of menu and user reviews.

The founders of Zomato

Two IIT graduates named Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah co-founded Zomato in July 2008. Before launching Zomato, they were employed with a management consulting firm named Bain & Co. (Delhi office).

The idea behind Zomato – A brief history

The idea of an online food menu struck the duo when they saw people standing in a queue at lunchtime in office and waiting for their chance to order. So they took pictures of the food court menu and uploaded them on their company’s private network. Everybody at the company started using the website, and Deepinder and Pankaj noted the huge traffic the network got in a few days’ time.

This gave them the idea of starting a portal called “Foodiebay”, where users could browse through the menu of eating joints and restaurants and see their reviews and ratings right from their computer. Foodiebay began listing restaurants from Delhi-NCR on their website and quickly expanded to other cities like Mumbai and Kolkata. The first professional restaurant that found its spot on Foodiebay was from Hauz Khas in Delhi.

Soon the website was covering thousands of restaurants from metropolitan cities and the founders thought that they would rebrand it with an appealing name that would attract customers in abroad too, if they expand to such a level. As a result,